WATCHING PLANTS GROW

During the late summer months, the heat comes on like a leather soup.  It descends each morning with the sunrise, tanned and wet and heavy, and sits on my shoulders and back and will not go away.  It slows my movements and makes me sloppy and wet.  On days like these, I like to put my chair under the trees and watch things grow.  I have heard people use this idea as an insult or an impossibility: watching the plants grow.  As in: “There’s nothing to do but watch the plants grow,” or, “It was so boring it was like watching plants grow.”  But I tell you this – you can watch certain plants grow if you know what to look for.

Things like carrots don’t like to be watched.  They are a shy green, and they carry a deep, orange secret that they don’t like to talk about until autumn.  Salad greens – mustard, leaf lettuce, spinach – don’t like to be watched either.  They are an independent family, and watching them too much makes them bitter.  It is best to leave leafy vegetables alone so that they grow curious, innocent, fresh-faced, so that when you pick them they taste like Spaniards on the Sierra Nevada naming the valleys and canyons after saints: San Pablo, San Diego, San Fernando, Santa Barbara, Santa Clara. 

Other vegetables like you to watch them grow.  The bean family, fagaecae, which includes peas, likes to be watched.  They explode out of the ground like comedians with their arms out, and grow in bushes that are collections of frantic vines.  Corn is another plant that likes to be watched.  Of all the things in my garden, corn is the most impetuous.  It is a flagrant, obvious plant, full of vigor and arrogance.  Planted at the same time with beans, it will sprout slowly and waver, and then shoot up, bringing the bean plant with it.  This is why people in this nation have always planted beans and corn together.  Both plants are vain.  Squash is also vain, and together the three brush each other’s hair and feed each other nitrogen and compliments, and grow up pretty and sweet. 

Because there are these different types of vegetables, I try to give the colossal Swede fresh produce that will complement the President’s political mood.  If Andrew Jackson seems content with things, I will send greens and perhaps something dark and unknowing, like a potato or an onion, something underground.  If Andrew Jackson is suspicious or serious or self-concerned, I send fresh corn or beans or squash.  When he eats them, he spends hours in front of the bedroom mirror, pacing and watching his eyebrows toss papers in the air and pound gavels on his forehead.  He imagines himself in a cheering audience, which, of course, he is in.  But it is an audience of collective vanity.  This is good for the President, when he is serious or self-concerned or suspicious.  After he expunges the vegetables, he is much more normal, and then I can feed him the wormwood again.